How The Race Was Won

Forget prize money and TV crews. The Boston Marathon was once just a footrace between a few hundred men.

It was, Bob Girardin remembers, a perfect spring morning. He was in Boston on April 19, 1934, with his college running coach, Clarence DeMar, to run his first Boston Marathon. By then DeMar was a seven-time winner, but, at 45, he was no threat to make it eight. Instead, he focused on his pupil's race.

"'Some people will try to push you out of the way,' DeMar told me just before the start," remembers Girardin, who was 26 at the time. He's 98 now, a retired teacher living in Foxboro, Massachusetts. "'You run like hell when they fire that gun. If you trip, they will step right over you.'" Run like hell he did, finishing in 3:27:40, good for 45th place out of 239 runners. "There were thousands of people along the road, especially at Wellesley, the girls, handing out water. The crowd was very supportive; they would pat you on the back if they could touch you."

Girardin, though, was well behind the lead pack that day and didn't see Dave Komonen, a Canadian shoe cobbler, pull away from a young Johnny Kelley to win in 2:32:53 (Kelley would be back, though; he finished Boston a record 58 times before his death in 2004). But while Girardin didn't witness Komonen's victory or the postrace ceremonies, those moments did not escape the camera lens of a little-known photographer with an affinity for the world's oldest marathon.

Earl Morgan Savage was a Boston native, born to a grocer and homemaker in 1907. As a freelance photographer who also ran his own small photo business, he shot parties, architecture, dog and horse shows-and the annual race from Hopkinton to Boston. From the mid-1920s through the mid-1930s, he took hundreds of race-day Boston Marathon photos, although only a few of his stirring black-and-whites ever appeared in print. But now, 20 years after Savage's death, they are finally receiving their due and are published nationally for the first time in the May issue of Runner's World. The rare images provide a revealing glimpse into the state of running during that era, and into the life of a photographer whose passion for his job matched the passion his subjects had for their sport.

"These images represent a fantastic opportunity to look back at our past," says Guy Morse, executive director of the Boston Athletic Association, organizers of the marathon. "It was a time in our history when we didn't have a lot of documentation." Morse learned of the photos' existence only in 2001 when a collector, Michael Sampson, donated them to the BAA, which is considering plans on how best to display them.
The first known marathon shots taken by Savage date to 1924, when he was just 17 and a recent high school graduate. For each of the dozen or so Bostons he photographed, Savage would carry his heavy box camera to the race start, or ride in a press bus alongside the leaders, or set up at the finish for pictures of runners, like Fred Ward Jr. in the 1931 race, just as they crossed the line. The marathon shots became part of a collection of 10,000 glass-plated negatives that Savage took with him to Cape Cod, where he retired in 1976. There they stayed, labeled and stored in wooden file cabinets, until 1987 when, shortly after Savage's death at 79, Sampson bought them at an estate sale. Of his decision to donate them to the BAA after nearly 15 years, Sampson says simply, "They deserve to have them."

The BAA, of course, was thrilled to acquire the photos from a distant part of its past. "Everything has changed," says Morse, "from the number of runners, to the style of running, to the environment." In some stretches of the race, Savage's photos show cars driving right next to runners. "It doesn't appear like the roads were even closed," Morse says.

Obviously, the runners themselves have changed, too. Consider the 1934 photograph of Komonen standing in baggy white shorts and a plain dark tank top next to the fedora-clutching mayor of Boston, Frederick W. Mansfield. There's no sports watch on Komonen's wrist, no Kenyans in sight, and no energy bar or sports drink in his hand. The postrace meal back then was beef stew and soda water.

Earl Morgan Savage's photos serve as a reminder that there was a time when this race was just a race-a day when a few hundred men (women wouldn't officially join them until 1972) took off from one town and ran 26 miles and 385 yards to another to see who was fastest. The winner's reward? A trophy. No money, and, as Bob Girardin can surely attest, no endorsements. "I wore an ordinary pair of Keds sneakers," he says of that 1934 race day. "I paid 50 cents for them but they fit."